New News Site: The Newsier Newser

An interesting news aggregation site has launched, with some non-obvious-yet-blue-chip names behind it: Newser.com is a new aggregation site which mixes human/editorial curation with algorithm-driven methods. The site has been launched by Patrick Spain, the CEO of Highbeam (cofounder and former CEO of Hoover’s) and Michael Wolff (that of Burnrate fame, and current Vanity Fair media columnist), and Caroline Miller, the former Editor in Chief of New York Magazine, is also the EIC of Newser.com. The mission of the site: “quickly learn more about the most important and most talked about news stories each day, as well as to dig a bit deeper on news topics that interest you.” You can probably use the same combination of words to describe most news aggregation sites out there, including Daylife, Newsvine, Digg, Netscape, and many others.

There is no doubt newser has an eye catching appealâ€¦.the content too is goodâ€¦but m wondering as to why didnâ€™t the ppl behind it allow space for comments, ainâ€™t it that important?….I can see it in other news aggregators like http://www.instablogs.com/ and http://www.newsvine.com/.

It certainly looks very nice. It doesnâ€™t seem, however, that the way in which it aggregates stories is all-together groundbreaking. According to the About section on the site –
â€œNewserâ€™s story selection is based on a proprietary formula that measures the ubiquity of coverage by the top-ranked 100 English-language news sites; the prominence with which those sites feature the stories; and the popularity of a given story with readers; and overlooked points of view, angles and scoops uncovered by our editors.â€

I remember talking to one of the editors at Bloomberg News last year and one of the big hurdles which still hasnâ€™t been crossed is determining which stories are indeed important well before the process of filtration by thousands of people. This is particularly pertinent for Bloombergâ€™s news feed which is watched by rather time-sensitive individuals.

Newser looks nice but it is like shoe-horning a portal play onto a web which is increasingly focused on niche and application/function, not on telling me which story is "big" right now. The point is, I already know that. I don't see this working…

Obviously I like their concept — but not sure what differentiated value they bring by only going after top 100 sites. At BuzzTracker we are explicitly searching the top 100 THOUSAND news sources every day for the most important stories across over 1,700 and counting topics. Our premise is the only way to go granular is to cast a wide net — and that granular is where there is still white space and where the future value will be delivered (how many places can you go to get sports news for example?) compared to places to find news on Vietnam, or Carlos Zambrano, or Colon Cancer.

jake is right. the post contains grammatical errors, missing words and several sentences that border on incomprehensibility. one knows, sort of, what the writer has in mind, but in journalism, "sort of" isn't good enough.